Psychological Anthropology Final Exam

Clifford Geertz

a critic of ethnoscience and structuralism. He wanted to move away from psychological anthropology

modern cultural anthropology is not doing _________

Science

ethnoscience and structuralism went into the head and tried to deduce symbols and that is what culture is, but they need to learn the logic of everyday social life.

Clifford Geertz criticized ethnoscience and structuralism for being too _____, ______, and too _____

abstract; suspiciously ordered, contained

Geertz definition of culture

humans create culture, you can look at culture in the way culture is external to the person. Watch human behavior and culture and interpreting it

Geertz explains cultural symbols as

extrinsic and outside of the person; extra-personal mechanisms of perception, understanding, judgement, and manipulation. provide a blueprint for social and psychological processes

interpretivism

engaging in interpretation

thick descriptions cons

interpretations are different for everyone

thick descriptions

detailed account of social actions to interpret human interactions

Geertz saw humans as a

non-exsitent, save for the capacity to have culture and thus to be regulated by culture

Sperber suggested a view of culture as __________

distributions of representations in a human population, ecological patterns of psychological things

Dan Sperber

broad thinking researcher; created the law of epidemiology of representations

Sperber’s Law of Epidemiology of Representations

in an oral tradition, all cultural representations are easily remembered ones; hard to remember representations are forgotten, or transformed into more easily remembered ones, before reaching a cultural level of distribution

Sperber argued that the most interesting cultural knowledge is _______

tacit knowledge

tacit knowledge

not directly taught, learned through personal experience and observation; people just know it

Pierre Bourdieu is best known for the concept of _______

habitus

habitus

the typically unconscious patterns of posture, speech, dress, and mental habits shared by people with a common cultural background

Clifford Geertz famously opined that the Western conception of the self is _____________

a rather peculiar idea within the context of world cultures

non-autonomous

they don’t necessarily experience their own actions or emotions as being self-caused, and instead may feel more like a component of a larger group system

non-individualized

they may not even conceive of themselves as individuated from a group. they may see much “we” but little “I”

Central claimed differences non-western selves are

non-autonomous and non-individualized

Melfrid Spiro

anthropologist, did fieldwork with Buddhist monks. he wanted to understand how the doctrine of Anatta (no self) impacted their lives

Melfrid Spiro found that Anatta (no self) played _________ in their lives.

almost no role

it is important not to conflate cultural ideal or normative statements about the _______________.

subject of the self with people’s actual experience and understanding

Uni Wikan claimed that Geertz ________

had the Balinese self entirely wrong

Uni Wikan found that

the Balinese are not concerned with roles and acting because they see the self as ephemeral, but because breaches in etiquette can be deadly

entitativity

the perception that a thing is “entity like” meaning unified, coherent, organized, and difficult to alter

individuals are perceived to have ________ entitativity

very high

Kashima et al. (2005) looked at what?

three East Asian populations and five Western populations

what did Kashima et al. (2005) find?

across all nations, individuals were seen to be more entitative than groups

East Asian countries saw groups as just as _____ as individuals

agentic (capable of being goal directed, being targets of praise or blame for their actions)